Police chief addresses uncomfortable and disappointing report

Devon and Cornwall Police chief constable Will Kerr started his role last month

Devon and Cornwall Police Chief Constable Will Kerr has deemed an inspectorate report rating the force inadequate in several areas "uncomfortable" and "disappointing".

The force has been told to make urgent improvements in areas such as responding to the public and managing offenders.

Mr Kerr said the force had already made "significant improvements".

He said it would make more throughout the year.

Responding to the report, Mr Kerr said: "It's uncomfortable, and it's disappointing, but this is also a healthy process and the whole value of having independent inspectorate bodies is that they can come in, take a deep look at what we're doing and tell us areas we need to improve."

The force was found to be "inadequate" in three areas

As to the cause he said: "It's been an amalgam of a number of different things, old IT systems, some competing priorities which policing certainly feels during the course of the pandemic, but all of that sounds very excusatory.

"The bottom line is there are three important areas for policing and the service that we provide to the public that we needed and we are getting better at... how the public can contact us, how we deal with serious sexual and violent offences, and how we record crime."

Mr Kerr said people dialling 999 getting through to police service quickly was "very important".

He said: "We've massively improved our performance in that area, so at the moment, and over the course of last month, January, over 90% of 999 calls, so over 23,000 999 calls that came into this force last month had been answered in under 10 seconds, which is the national standard.

"That's what the public deserve, expect, and we will absolutely maintain that."

'Vast array of demand'

Mr Kerr admitted there were other areas around non-emergency 101 calls where there were "still a number of improvements" to be made.

He said: "Some of that, in part, reflects that vast array of demand that's coming in to policing, non-emergency demand that reflects, in some part, service failures in other parts of the public sector, not least around mental health demand.

"That consumes an awful lot of our capacity, and our time, and our effort, and actually sometimes, we want to draw back and be able to deal with the core things that the public would expect us to deal with, but we are spending far too much of our time dealing with that non-core demand."

The chief also addressed the force's failure to record more than 18,000 crimes over a one-year period.

He said the force had to record "multiple crimes" against one victim, and although he admitted this was "exactly the way it should be", he said the force's systems had sometimes failed to record secondary and tertiary crimes.

Mr Kerr added: "That doesn't mean that the individual victim isn't getting the response or the investigation or the attention that they absolutely deserve, but our systems are letting us and those victims down in terms of how we record the totality of what's happened to them, and making sure that they get the fullest service available."

'Really significant improvements'

The inspectorate's report found Devon and Cornwall Police was "too often failing" to record reports of violent crime including harassment, stalking, controlling and coercive behaviour and domestic abuse.

Responding to this, Mr Kerr said the force had "leant into very, very robustly and assertively", even before he took over the position four weeks ago.

He said: "There really have been significant improvements in that respect, some of it was capacity-based, we just needed to put more investigators and more managers into that space, to make sure the caseload was appropriate and the investigators could actually deal with those crimes and cases as quickly as possible - that's happened."